I am reading a very confusing book, it’s called The Refusal of Silence and I’ll write a proper review once I’ve finished but mainly I feel it’s very confusing even though it occasionally says some brilliant things.

Like yesterday I was reading it on the bus on the way home from my kiddie classes, which went fairly well although there’s one 4 year old girl who is afraid of me and when her mother left she just stood in the middle of the room and refused to take a chair, and when I knelt down to be on her level and told her it would all be all right in my most child assuring voice, I could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. Her mother came back in and sat with her through the whole lesson, which was not good because she had a baby with her as well, but I’m fairly confident it will be O.K. after a few lessons. Her big sister was nervous at the beginning, too, and is a great student, and helps me a lot in the bigger kids’ class because she is the best reader.

But, I meant to talk about the book. There was a line where the protagonist sees a girl in a T shirt that says “Each generation needs it’s own revolution” and he misreads it as “Every sensation is a revolution” and he wonders if the truth is sometimes revealed through our misreadings and our misinterpretations of things.

It’s a good question. But, my takeaway from that was the T shirt slogan itself. First of all, every generation needs its own revolution because every generation wants to define itself but, more and more, every generation needs its own revolution because every generation is dealing with a new reality, technology is changing so fast and due to that our society is changing so fast that it takes a revolution every decade or so just to keep up.

As much as my generation suspected that the older generation didn’t know what we were all about, I am sure that the current generation is even more certain that my generation has no clue what is going on, and the tragedy is: they are right.